Again, Bess

Back to jail went Ben Bess, South Carolina's most conspicuous contemporary Negro. Ben Bess first went to jail for a 30-year term in 1915, on the testimony of a white-trash woman named Maude Collins who swore he had raped her. Last spring Ben Bess was pardoned by Governor Richards after Maude Collins had signed an affidavit saying her original testimony was false (TIME, June 11).

Indignation was widespread in South Carolina and Maude Collins heard that Governor Richards was wondering if she had not committed perjury in the first instance. Frightened, she retracted her retraction, said she had signed the affidavit without knowing what it said, in return for $50 from Ben Bess's wife. The Bess side explained that Maude Collins had refused to sign anything unless she got paid. But Circuit Court Judge W. H. Townsend last week decided that the $50 was bribery, that bribery "vitiates" all things, even a Governor's pardon.